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So it’s been a few days years since I’ve blogged. I’ll talk more about that in a future post. But nothing gets the Disorientedblog-outrage juices flowing like an unexpected, vicious, evil assault on LGBT Christians.

And make no mistake, that’s what the “Nashville Statement” produced by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood this week is. Not only was it unexpected, but it comes at a time when LGBT people are feeling particularly vulnerable. It is certainly vicious.

And, yes, it is evil. I’ve discussed in this space before how the words of prominent Christians affect the lives of LGBT youth, who are at increased risk for homelessness, addiction, self-harm and suicide – almost all of it traceable to the shame and ostracism they feel from people who claim to love them.

Lots of people have said lots of things about the Nashville Statement (the condemnations have been refreshingly swift and fierce), but if I had to summarize the most interestingshockinghorrifying elements, it would be these:

Articles III and IV describe differences between men and women as “divinely ordained,” but does not attempt to describe what those differences are.

Article V says that genitals “are integral to God’s design for self-conception as male or female,” and posits a “God-appointed link” between a person’s genitalia and their self-conception.

Article VI acknowledges the existence of intersex people and affirms that they “have dignity and worth equal to all other” humans … but makes no effort to reconcile their existence with Article V’s emphasis on genitals being “integral to God’s design for self-conception.”

Article X is truly shocking, as it labels support of same-sex relationships and “transgenderism” (which isn’t a thing) “an essential departure from Christian faithfulness,” leading to the inescapable – and, to their credit, explicitly stated – conclusion that “faithful Christians” cannot “agree to disagree” on whether to affirm same-sex relationships and transgender people. This draws the line, and millions of baptized Christians who affirm the divinity and resurrection of Christ while also affirming same-sex marriages are on the wrong side.

Article XIII argues that the grace of God, rather than providing room to disagree on complex and sensitive issues like transgender identity, “enables sinners to forsake transgender self-conceptions … that are at odds with God’s revealed will.”

And, going out of order, because this is the crux of my post: Article VII says a person’s notion of their masculinity or femininity “should be defined by God’s holy purposes in creation and redemption as revealed in Scripture.”

Here, so far as I can tell is a complete rundown of all of the Bible verses directly or indirectly quoted in the 14 articles of the Nashville Statement:

Article VI quotes Matt 19:12 regarding intersex people: “… our Lord Jesus in his words about ‘eunuchs who were born that way from their mother’s womb.'”

That’s it. One verse that likely was never intended to address the subject the CBMW rips it out of context to address. For a group with “Biblical” right in the name and 14 articles discussing what they allege are biblical views of gender and sexuality, that’s awfully skimpy.

Rather than go any more at length into the manifest wrongness of the Nashville Statement – and make no mistake, it is wrong on nearly every count, whether you’re looking at it morally, psychologically, scientifically or biblically – let me just respond with a few Bible verses the CBMW maybe could have used to create a statement more in keeping with the Jesus they claim to follow:

“And the Lord God said, ‘It is not good for a person to be alone.'” – Genesis 2:18

“Love your neighbor as yourself.” – Leviticus 19:18

“Love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. … Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot wash it away.” – Song of Songs 8:6-7

“For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.” – Hosea 6:6

“With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings? … He has shown you, oh human, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” – Micah 6:6, 8

“So in everything do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” – Matthew 7:12

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” – Matthew 11:28-30

“‘ Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” – Matthew 22:37-40/Mark 12:30-31

“‘Which of these do you think was the neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?’ The expert in the law replied, ‘The one who had mercy on him.’ Jesus told him, ‘Go and do likewise.’” – Luke 10:36-37

“Woe to you, Pharisees, because you [tithe] but you neglect justice and the love of God. … And you experts of the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.” – Luke 11:42, 46

“This is my command: Love each other.” – John 15:17

“You therefore have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself because you who pass judgment do the same things.” – Romans 2:1

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God.” – Romans 8:37-39

“Each of us will give an account of themselves to God. Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another.” – Romans 14:12-13

“Now to the unmarried I say: … If they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.” – 1 Corinthians 7:8-9

“Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. The person who thinks they know something does not yet know as they ought to know. But the person who loves God is known by God.” – 1 Corinthians 8:1-3

“If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames but have not love, I am nothing. … And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” – 1 Corinthians 13:3, 13

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” – Galatians 3:28

“Therefore, my dear friends … continue to work out your own salvation in fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and act according to his purpose.” – Philippians 7:12-13

“Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. … And over all these virtues, put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.” – Colossians 3:12, 14

“Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” – 1 Peter 4:8

“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. … God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. … There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. We love because God first loved us. If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates a brother or sister, that person is a liar.” – 1 John 4:7-8, 16, 18-20

I think about health care a lot. We are blessed with three healthy children – but not so healthy that there haven’t been scares and emergencies. We’ve been to the hospital at least once with each child in the last five years, not to mention the hospital visits to actually give birth.

So I think about health care a lot. Because many families are not as lucky as we have been. Their children need many more hospital visits, or round-the-clock care, or expensive medication taken every day. And that’s expensive, more than they can afford.

This is the reason that a man leaves his father and mother and embraces his wife, and they become one flesh.

It’s cited widely elsewhere in the Bible – in all three of the synoptic gospel’s portrayals of Jesus’ divorce teachings, in 1 Corinthians 6 and in Ephesians 5. And it’s lately become the crux in what I call the template argument, in which this verse provides the proof that God designed marriage to be between one man and one woman.

This verse came back to my attention while reading the short – though quite dense – book The Septuagint, Sexuality and the New Testament by William Loader, professor of New Testament at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. Loader is looking for ways in which the Septuagint translators changed the Hebrew text of certain Old Testament passages dealing with sexuality, and how those changes influenced the arguments of Greco-Roman Jews relying on the Septuagint, particularly Philo of Alexandria and Paul of Tarsus.

I’m reading through Eldon Jay Epp’s book Junia: The First Woman Apostle, which has succeeded in blowing my mind, and we haven’t even gotten to Junia yet.

Epp starts the book by talking about textual criticism, the means by which scholars look at the oldest texts we have and study their language and variations, and the problems such criticism poses for exegetical certainty. For example, everyone here is familiar with 1 Corinthians 14:34-35:

34 the women should be quiet during the meeting. They are not allowed to talk. Instead, they need to get under control, just as the Law says. 35 If they want to learn something, they should ask their husbands at home. It is disgraceful for a woman to talk during the meeting.

Pretty clear, right? But let’s zoom out a little and see what we find when we include it in context:

31 You can all prophesy one at a time so that everyone can learn and be encouraged. 32 The spirits of prophets are under the control of the prophets. 33 God isn’t a God of disorder but of peace.

(Like in all the churches of God’s people, 34 the women should be quiet during the meeting. They are not allowed to talk. Instead, they need to get under control, just as the Law says. 35 If they want to learn something, they should ask their husbands at home. It is disgraceful for a woman to talk during the meeting. 36 Did the word of God originate with you? Has it come only to you?)

37 If anyone thinks that they are prophets or “spiritual people,” then let them recognize that what I’m writing to you is the Lord’s command. 38 If someone doesn’t recognize this, they aren’t recognized. 39 So then, brothers and sisters, use your ambition to try to get the gift of prophecy, but don’t prevent speaking in tongues. 40 Everything should be done with dignity and in proper order.

The parentheses, which Epp includes in his treatment of these paragraphs, kind of give it away: One of these paragraphs is not like the other two. You could read from verse 33a to verse 37 without any trouble, as if verses 33b-36 didn’t exist. That’s interesting enough, but by itself doesn’t prove that verses 33b-35 or 36 are later additions to the text.

But Epp goes on to point out that not every text of 1 Corinthians place verses 34-35 between 33 and 36; some place it after verse 40. So this text is a little more mobile than your typical Pauline text. Also, though every text of 1 Corinthians 14 we have includes this passage, at least two of our earliest versions (Codex Fuldensis, dated to 547, and Codex Vaticanus, dated to the 300s) include scribal notations also found with such passages as John’s story of the woman caught in adultery, a well known case of textual variation. As Epp puts it:

This combination of literary analysis and text-critical assessment has moved a sizable group of scholars to view the passage on “silent women” as a later intrusion into 1 Corinthians and most likely one never written by Paul. (19)

So what does this mean? What do we do if one of the key passages governing gender roles in conservative and fundamentalist churches turns out to be a later, non-Pauline addition? After all, it’s still in our Bibles, and – at least theoretically – Paul is not of greater importance than any other biblical writer (though we Protestants certainly seem to prefer him to, say, James).

But the point is not to simply dismiss pieces of the Bible we don’t like; the point is to recognize that the Bible itself – not any particular passage but the very nature of the texts we have – rejects our attempts to flatten it into a cut-and-paste set of rules for 21st century life and worship.

I’m a big fan of Gregory of Nyssa, the bishop from Cappadocia (modern-day Turkey, more or less) who lived in the middle fourth century. For my Patristic and Medieval Theology class, I wrote a paper about Gregory’s universalism, which led me to this book, and therefore this series.

Gregory’s universalism was complete and total – when Gregory said that all of God’s creation would eventually be restored to him, he meant it, Satan, demons and all. In my paper, which I’ll post once I get the grade back, I argue Gregory’s expansive view of the goodness of God, which Gregory believed was the overarching divine characteristic against which all of God’s actions must be judged, required the belief in Satan’s salvation. Without it, either the evil to which Satan had turned was stronger than the inherent goodness Satan carried as part of God’s good creation – and therefore evil was stronger than God – or God’s deceit of Satan in the atonement was simply justice without mercy, and therefore not good. We’ll talk about that more when I post the paper later this summer.

Unfortunately, Steven R. Harmon touches very little on all of that in his chapter of “All Shall Be Well,” titled “The Subjection of All Things in Christ: The Christocentric Universalism of Gregory of Nyssa (331/340–c.395).”

Instead, as the title indicates, Harmon focuses on the role of Jesus in God’s plan to restore all things. He argues that such a role is somewhat hidden because Gregory talks so much about what God does in the reconciliation process.

I kind of accidentally on purpose took a two- or three-week sabbatical from blogging before last week’s post about homosexuality. Truth be told, most mornings I just didn’t have it in me to jump onto the computer and type away. So I didn’t. Call it burnout or just plain laziness, but that’s why I disappeared for a while.

With my post last week, I intended to resume a more consistent schedule closer to how I had been posting for most of the first year-plus of this little diary: twice to three times a week. But then my wife and I both got hammered with upper respiratory infections, hence my more recent absence.

But now I’m back! I definitely have some things to follow up on from last week’s post, but for now, as I re-enter the fray, I for one am grateful that one major player is exiting it:

“The Lethality of Loneliness” describes how psychobiologists “have proved that long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you.” Loneliness is defined as “want of intimacy.”

The story is fascinating and well worth reading. Shulevitz reports that scientists rank emotional isolation as highly as smoking among risk factors for mortality, and those most likely to feel emotionally isolated are those who are most rejected – as Shulevitz puts it, “The outsiders: not just the elderly, but also the poor, the bullied, the different” (emphasis hers). The lonely experience higher levels of stress, which injects the hormone cortisol into the bloodstream, the chronic overdosing of which leads to numerous maladies, the most serious being heart disease.

Since those who are rejected feel lonely more often, we shouldn’t be surprised that some of the biggest studies into loneliness have occurred among those who are gay. Scientists studying HIV-infected gay men in the 1980s discovered this incredible fact: “The social experience that most reliably predicted whether an HIV-positive gay man would die quickly … was whether or not he was in the closet.”

Closeted men were more sensitive to rejection, more fearful of being outed, and therefore less intimate with those around them. Their lives were more stressful, and stress hormones feed the AIDS virus. And then came the sentence that stopped me cold:

[Researcher Steven] Cole mulled these results over for a long time, but couldn’t understand why we would have been built in such a way that loneliness would interfere with our ability to fend off disease: “Did God want us to die when we got stressed?”